Measuring Progress on Acton for Climate Empowerment: The indicator development challenge

• In Event: Action for Climate Empowerment and Climate Communication

Proposal

The UNFCCC’s Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) policy program has become a useful framework for the mainstreaming of climate communication and education (CCE) globally. The ACE framework includes six elements: Education, Training, Public Awareness, Public Participation, Public Access to Information, and International Cooperation. Yet for ACE to have an impact on the growing global climate emergency, the quality and quantity of ‘ACE’ or CCE must dramatically increase around the world. In addition, we lack internationally consistent and agreed upon ways of tracking and reporting progress in this area.

This presentation shares some of the work of the Monitoring and Evaluating Climate Communication and Education (MECCE) Project, a partnership funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada with over 100 partners and collaborators globally. As one of its activities, the MECCE Project is developing a suite of robust cross-country indicators, with accompanying datasets, to support global benchmarking and policy dialogue on ACE. Over 150 international data sources have been identified and, following careful review, 2-3 datasets for 6 ACE components (i.e., Primary/ Secondary Education, Higher Education, Training, Public Awareness, Public Participation, Public Access to Information) have been selected for further development. This includes developing indicators in each area to support monitoring, evaluation, and reporting on ACE at country and intergovernmental levels.

In undertaking this work, the partnership project has tackled several challenges, which will be discussed. First, there is a general lack of country level education data overall, even more so in the areas of ACE, or CCE. For example, many countries have devolved authority over curricular matters, including climate change education, to sub-national entities. There is almost no systematic, country-level data about the implementation of climate change education in schools, including on the impact of such educational interventions on cognitive, dispositional, value-oriented and behavioral outcomes. Most higher education institutions also operate with considerable independence with minimal national oversight. While there have been some in depth and concrete efforts to measure other ACE elements, these have tended to be limited in scope and scale, and are mainly at the regional or national levels.

With these challenges in mind, the MECCE project is carefully reviewing all existing CCE datasets, systematically noting their limitations and biases, while also undertaking the creation of new and innovative data streams by working with experts, UN agencies, and partner organizations in the area. This presentation will provide an overview of these on-going efforts and indicate areas of progress, including the presentation of the data and indicators on an open access interactive data platform to support increased ACE tracking, target setting, and implementation by countries and globally.

Authors

• Aaron Redman

• Aaron Benavot, University at Albany-State University of New York

• Marcia Mckenzie, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne